My Lord, We Need More Dinars!

Empires in the old days ran on two things: taxes from the people and trade from other nations, or between your own cities. This is where most of your empire’s cash will come from.

And why do you need the cash? You need to maintain everything, from your cities to your armies, so that citizens don’t rebel and you can support your ever growing contingent of armed forces.

Early on, managing taxes seems a simple enough job, as well as controlling and dictating provincial and empire growth (from an economic and development standpoint). However, try doing this when you control 30 cities midway through the game. You will feel like an accountant, looking at so many numbers and tax figures.

Trade is important. If you don’t have trade, your cities will not grow. If they do not grow, you cannot put higher taxes on them. If you can’t do that, then you will not be able to increase your empire’s resources, as well as construct bigger and better buildings and soldier-training academies, to basically make your army better.

If you don’t have a good army, you can’t keep public order, causing your citizens to rebel. And when they rebel, they don’t pay their taxes. And then your trade stops, because the citizens are rebelling. This can happen all in one city. Or all of the other 30 cities as well. Or more. Crikey.

There is also the option of letting the game auto-manage the tax rates for you. By and large, it does a decent job of doing so, but it cannot target specific cities for increased or decreased taxes, which you would have to do yourself.

This brings us to another intriguing aspect of empire management. Your cities are not run directly by you!